Science Library Pad

ICSTI 2009 - Managing Data for Science

The ICSTI 2009 conference has a great lineup of speakers on its programme.  (I can't claim any responsibility for this, since while my organisation has helped with planning the conference, my small personal contribution has just been a few suggestions about the web presence.)

Many of the names you may recognize from enthusiastic blog postings of mine, so as you can imagine, I'm looking forward to going.  Speakers mentioned in this blog (with a link to the relevant posting) include

• Francine Berman (ARL library escience theme presentations - October 9, 2006)
• Richard Boulderstone (BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog - March 7, 2007)
• Jan Brase (system for easy access to sci info using DOIs - Jan Brase - June 11 - IATUL 2007 - June 11, 2007)
• Lee Dirks (data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy - June 22, 2007)
• Liz Lyon (presentations on e-Science and e-Biz workflow, and research data preservation - March 31, 2006)
• Paul Uhlir (the concepts of open science and information commons - September 8, 2006)

The event will be June 9-10, 2009 at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa.  Early registration ends March 31.  I think it will be a great opportunity to discuss science data, e-science, and the roles that our libraries can play.  I am using tag icsti2009.  I hope to see many of you there.

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revisiting potential research-support roles for the library

Three years ago, I wrote this list of potential research-support roles for a library in the digital environment:

1. institutional repository for pre-prints and post-prints of the research organization's publications
2. data repository for the research conducted at the organization
3. providing advanced (data/publication/information/discovery/etc.) tools that integrate into the researcher's workflow

These are numbered for convenience, not importance.
What do I think, three years on.

Institutional Repositories

1. While institutional repositories are valuable, they currently benefit primarily organisations, not researchers.  They provide a unified view of an organisation's published output.  For individual researchers, their priority may be just on getting published, or if they do want to disseminate their work, they may just post it to their own website (and sad to say, may get more Google rank having it there than in their repository).

Because of this property, there is still a huge content recruitment challenge for IRs.  I saw this at SPARC Digital Repositories 2008 where, to be blunt, the tone seemed to be mostly "we built it and they didn't come".  And in fairness to individual organisations, even Wellcome with its billions and its mandatory policy isn't getting good compliance:

The Wellcome Trust have been monitoring compliance rates, and have been disappointed to find that these are currently very low. As a result of this, they intend to more actively monitor compliance, and in future will be contacting researchers who have not had articles published as Open Access papers.

Wellcome gets tough on Open Access depositions - Peter Murray-Rust's blog - March 7, 2009

Even if you just look at the language we use - "recruitment", "compliance" - it's clear that IRs have become about coercion, which should be making us seriously question their value.  The good news is that there is a lot of good thinking about this - for example Les Carr suggests the idea of making the repository a file system for researchers, and many have suggested making repositories more web-friendly (or eliminating this special container we call IRs altogether, and just using regular web tools).

If providing an institutional repository is your primary or core value to the organisation, you are putting yourself at tremendous risk, because a savvy administrator may notice that you can purchase hosted repository services from BePress and BMC Open Repository.  Any time a primary function (however valuable) has become commodity, you are at risk.

Data

2. Data is a strange thing.  Unlike the publisher resistance to article repositories, there is pretty much universal agreement amongst all parties that data should be openly shared.  There are many reasons it is mostly not being shared.  Data can have very complicated licensing.  By its very nature, it is complex to manage and interpret.  And researchers who are, to be blunt, somewhat indifferent to sharing their papers, may actively resist sharing their data as they may feel it is the foundation of their future research.  There's lots of good work being done - just today Peter Murray-Rust points to some practical developments in Open Data in Science - and John Wilbanks and his team have been doing deep and valuable work on data licensing as part of Science Commons (see e.g. Databases and Creative Commons), but we are a long ways away from massive, agreed-upon sharing and preservation of data.  Also a risky area in which to bet your organisation, but a good area to be doing small, practical experiments in data sharing and preservation with willing researchers.  Canada unfortunately lacks an equivalent of the UK's national Digital Curation Centre to help make this happen here.  There is an effort to gather information as part of Research Data Canada, but I don't know how widely known it is.

This is an activity that will have great value, once all the hugely complicated issues begin to be resolved.  Data is very different from journal articles - it lacks a standard format, and the resources it can consume - into the petabytes make it a daunting task for any organisation or set of organisations to take on.  I really admire the practical work that Amazon is doing with Public Datasets (thanks I suspect in large part to the vision of Deepak Singh).  The most practical things we can do right now is share what data we have, think about what open data will mean, and try to get more and more data openly shared.

Advanced Discovery and e-Science

3. This is an important area that I think offers enormous potential for libraries.  In Canada it is also hugely challenging because we have no national equivalent of the US NSF Cyberinfrastructure or the UK National e-Science Centre.  The best we can do is kind of grassroots e-science, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, since the common understanding of e-science is that it is about tackling large scale problems with large scale infrastructure.

Where I think things are possible is on the smaller scale, building and integrating advanced discovery and integration with researcher workflows piece-by-piece.  (This shouldn't be read as "build all" - integrating includes e.g. helping researchers integrate Connotea, Zotero, etc. into their workflows.)  Many researchers are not that web-aware beyond Google searching - there are all kinds of tools that they could use.  The library has a role in providing information about those tools.  In the near term, there are some very quick wins just providing better discovery and information management tools, most of which are already available for free on the web.  In the medium term, there are intriguing possibilities to support researchers with Virtual Research Environments.  And in the long term, true semantic discovery may be possible, with very advanced computational and visualisation tools supporting very sophisticated computer- and data-driven science.

Many pieces of this environment are being built.  The library has a key role in integrating them and educating researchers about them.  As indicated above, this is everything from

basic citation management - Connotea, Zotero and many others
to
Virtual Research Environments as being investigated by JISC and the British Library (PDF)
to
text mining on full-text, as planned by UKPMC
to
semantic discovery as is being pioneered by EMBL, Biogen Idec library, and many others in many fields (too many to list, but just in biomed see e.g. Semantic Mining in Biomedicine Symposiums and "Pharmas Nudge Semantic Web Technology Toward Practical Drug Discovery Applications")

As you can see this is an exciting space with many activities going on.  The (research) libraries that can have a meaningful presence in this space (which currently has some daunting technical and infrastructure requirements at the high end) will, I believe, be able to sustain themselves by providing truly relevant and valued services to their researchers.

An important point must be made here: if you don't have some point of connection with your researchers - some discovery tools on your site and in their browser that the library provides, then you have no point of contact or credibility upon which to base all the advanced capabilities you may want to bring to bear.

UPDATE: I wanted to add some closing thoughts about the focus of this post.  I'm a technology planner (that's a large part of the meaning of the rather grander "enterprise technology architect" job description I have).  That means my main focus is on the technologies the organisation uses.  Not the specific implementations (DSpace vs. Fedora) but the general classes of technology-enabled business functions in the organisation that are provided.  So what I'm working through above is what kinds of approaches will be sustainable technology differentiators.  That is, where can your library add technology-supported value that will be recognised by researchers.  This has some implications for the people roles, the jobs the librarians would do, but I'm not examining that aspect.  ENDUPDATE

Some of the topics about data and e-science that I have discussed above will be covered in the ICSTI 2009 conference in Ottawa this June (about which more in the following posting).

library support for open science

A nice overview of the challenges and opportunities for academic libraries as we plan to support 2020 science.

The Future of Research (Science and Technology)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: library research)

Some calls out to the Microsoft Towards 2020 Science report as well as various open science and science data initiatives.

From a presentation to the British Library Board on an Awayday (a charming term) by Carole Goble.
If the embedded presentation isn't working, you can also try it directly on Slideshare, or download the PowerPoint.

via FriendFeed

Previously:
March 23, 2006  various ideas about the future of science and computing

Libraries in E-Science - Christine Borgman

A digital video of Christine L. Borgman's "Role of Libraries in E-Science" presentation at EAHIL 2008 is available. Her presentation slides are also available.

Video: Christine Borgman on the Role of Libraries in E-Science - Digital Koans - July 21st, 2008

I reviewed Borgman's book Scholarship in the Digital Age for Nature; she has a comprehensive view of the many different factors that go into scholarly communication online.

getting HEP to scholarly infrastructure

As an appropriate follow-on to my previous post thinking about domain-specific sites on the net, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN DG-elect, shows us what a High-Energy Physics (HEP) e-Infrastructure for Scientific Communication may look like:

1. Build a complete HEP information platform
2. Enable text- and data-mining applications
3. Demonstrate and deploy Web2.0 applications
4. Preservation and re-use of research data

www.scoap3.org/files/APE2008-Heuer.pdf

As you might expect from the URL, there is also some discussion of the SCOAP3 initiative.

Although there are of course aspects that are unique to the HEP community, there are also lots of ideas that are generally applicable to domain portals for other areas of science.

Previously:
June 11, 2007  IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3
June 11, 2007  OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

Library Support for E-Science - ARL Final Report

A challenge:

Whither Science Libraries?

What are contemporary library uses and needs
of the scientific community? Are subscriptions to
e-journals sufficient? The emergence of escience
raises important questions about the
services and infrastructure within ARL libraries
in support of science.

Libraries may, in fact, be creating obstacles to
emerging interdisciplinary models of science.
Branch libraries based on separate collections in
related areas of the sciences are cited as a
hindrance to multidisciplinary research at a time
when online access transcends discipline-based
collections.  Other recent behavioral
assessments suggest that libraries are often not
perceived as part of the evolving research
infrastructure in support of interdisciplinary,
team science.

There is a perception that science librarians,
more than ever before, need to be actively
engaged with their user communities. They need
to understand not only the concepts of the
domain, but also the methodologies and norms
of scholarly exchange. This level of
understanding and engagement goes well
beyond knowledge of the literature. It requires
being a trusted member of the community with
recognized authority in information related
matters. This new paradigm suggests a shift in
focus from managing specialized collections (the
“branch library” model) to one that emphasizes
outreach and engagement.

Many science librarians, of course, are already
doing this. There are examples of science and
health science librarians working with faculty in
teaching courses, participating in research
projects, and publishing. Are these models
extensible? Can we re-conceive the science
library for e-science?

Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries - Final Report and Recommendations (PDF) - Association of Research Libraries: Library Support for E-Science - November 2007

A way forward - Model Principles.  I must admit, when I was blogging for the OECD, I had a hard time grasping the shape of the conversations that were going on.  This set of model principles (based on a draft from Chuck Humphrey), from Appendix B of the ARL E-Science Final Report, provides a clear set of topics that research libraries should consider (I have trimmed some entries - see the document for full versions):

1. Open Access: Research libraries will support open access policies and practices regarding scientific knowledge and e-science.

2. Open Data: Access to open data is a movement supported by research libraries, taking into consideration the ethical treatment of human-subject data.

3. Collaboration: Research libraries will collaborate with multi-institutional, interdisciplinary
research projects by developing and supporting digital repositories for their research outputs,
data, and metadata.

4. Digital Stewardship & Preservation: Research libraries will have institutional repositories that meet international preservation and interoperability standards and practices.

5. Equitable Service and Support: Research libraries will work collectively to ensure that gaps do not develop in the levels of support provided across e-sciences.

6. Professional Development & Investment: Research libraries will develop the human capital to provide the range of knowledge management skills at the appropriate level needed by esciences.

7. Metadata Standards & Metadata Creation: Research libraries will spearhead initiatives to develop metadata standards supportive of scientific data.

8. There is no number 8.

9. Virtual Communities: Research libraries will contribute to the establishment of and
participate in virtual laboratories or organizations developed across e-sciences.

10. Sustainable Models: Research libraries will participate in the development of and contribute to sustainable business models for the resources and services essential to e-sciences.

11. Communication: Research libraries will participate in initiatives to increase wider
professional and public understanding of e-science contributions to knowledge and its
infrastructural requirements.

* The June 2008 OECD Ministerial Meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy will be
considering a set of digital information principles, indicating a broad international interest in
developing principles for cyberinformation. (See
http://www.oecd.org/department/0,3355,en_2649_34223_1_1_1_1_1,00.html )

This gives me a great opportunity to connect to more information from the 2007 OECD Participative Web meeting in Ottawa.  You can read my blog postings about the e-science presentations, and I have been remiss in not pointing out the video (Windows Media) of the presentations (the session starts at 05:30 into the stream).  The presentations are in English (the introduction is in French).

PS For a more direct (and memorable) link to the OECD Future of the Internet Economy work, use http://www.oecd.org/FutureInternet 

Info about the ARL final report via Bev Brown, from asis-l and CNI Announce.

Designing Cyberinfrastructure 2007

I am a bit late to this content, but there was a conference "Designing Cyberinfrastructure" in January

http://cyberinfrastructure.us/
or http://www.si.umich.edu/cyber-infrastructure/

with the papers published in a special issue of First Monday in June

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_6/

It's more grid, policy and patent focused than about specific IT architecture(s).

Some papers and presentations of interest:

• The Open Science Grid (paper), Building Large-Scale Cyberinfrastructure Through Collaboration (PowerPoint presentation) - Paul Avery
• Cyberinfrastructure and Innovation Policy - Brian Kahin
• Cyberinfrastructure, Institutions, and Sustainability - Chris Mackie
• Implementing Openness: An International Institutional Perspective - Sacha Wunsch–Vincent, Taylor Reynolds, and Andrew Wyckoff

I hope that these sorts of discussions will continue, but also as I indicated, start to encompass the idea of IT architectures for (in Christine Borgman's term) "scholarly infrastructure", that will bring in many more services and capabilities than just the compute and storage focus of the grid initiatives.

Previously:
November 12, 2007  Enterprise Services Architectures - Chris Mackie - DLF Fall Forum 2007
September 30, 2007  Blog for OECD Participative Web goes live (Sacha Wunsch–Vincent played a key role in enabling this)

Economist on systems biology

Keeping track of the data needed to carry out systems biology on this scale will be a Herculean task, and may turn out to be the driver of future developments at the heavy-number-crunching end of the computer industry. Dr Noble is in negotiations with Fujitsu, a Japanese computer firm that is developing a machine capable of performing some ten thousand trillion calculations a second. That would make it the world's fastest computer, but it comes with a price tag to match—about a billion dollars.

Economist - All systems go - October 25, 2007

SOA and escience info via EDUCAUSE

Ran across a couple items on Service-Oriented Architecture provided by EDUCAUSE:

"Service-Oriented Architecture—What Is It, and How Do We Get One?" by Jim Phelps and Brian Busby in EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3, 2007

And from the Seminars on Academic Computing (SAC) 2007 (August 3-8, 2007)

Session on Service-Oriented Architecture
Charles F. Leonhardt (Georgetown University), Piet Niederhausen (Georgetown University), and Jens Haeusser (The University of British Columbia) - three PowerPoint presentations plus a podcast

The Institutional Challenges of Cyberinfrastructure and E-Research
Clifford A. Lynch - podcast

There is also an EDUCAUSE tag view you can follow:

http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/Service-oriented%2BArchitecture

Previously:
January 30, 2007  report on [EDUCAUSE] Library Future Roles webcast

Open Chemistry

Murray-Rust, Peter. Open Chemistry. Available from Nature Precedings http://hdl.nature.com/10101/npre.2007.1200.1 (2007)

discussion in his blog at http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=650

This is an interesting choice:

reducing the citation count to zero. I provide one link to the blogosphere which then links to the rest of the blogosphere and I provide 2 other links to other information. For the rest I use copious links to Wikipedia, which should increasingly replace ritualised citation of methods, algorithms, fundamental work, etc. Of course this isn’t applicable to most current scientific publications, but it’s worth considering whether the reader is disadvantaged. I doubt it.

CLIR cyberinfrastructure short articles

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has a publication which I guess is called CLIR Issues, some recent... issues it has covered in its... issues include:

• Digital Scholarship: What's All the Fuss?
  by Stephen Nichols
• Cyberinfrastructure: It's All about Sharing
  by Amy Friedlander
• As We May Rethink
  by Chuck Henry

here's a section from "As We May Rethink":

The new cyberinfrastructure calls into question many of the methods and procedures with which we have worked for the past two decades. We have become comfortable with the technology, and execute much of our work using familiar applications on indispensable machines. CI is, in essence, an environment that facilitates sharing of data on an unprecedented scale, which in turn implies a far greater degree of federation, aggregation, and interoperable capabilities than we have heretofore experienced. It demands new kinds of expertise, which will require new forms of training and mentoring to recognize and respond to changing research behaviors. While the transformational potential of CI on higher education is not difficult to intuit, the details of this transformation have yet to be defined, and remain ambiguous.

It is precisely this ambiguity that allows us to explore the multiple possibilities of developing a functional and robust cyberinfrastructure and to create this new environment in the most flexible and nuanced fashion possible. Succeeding in the evolving CI will require that we thoroughly rethink our procedures and expectations on the technical as well as the social levels, for the technical and social are deeply interrelated in cyberinfrastructure.

Consider, for example, the sheer enormity of data to be supported. Many of the vast data sets are relatively new—not only in the humanities, with its large full-text and video databases, but also in astronomy and particle physics. Challenges such as data mining, semantic searches, multimedia data stewardship, and interoperability are common to all disciplines. This suggests that forward-looking researchers and scholars will need to exchange ideas and CI requirements for their mutual benefit.

There is little precedent for this kind of interdisciplinary dialogue. Past practice, characterized by a focus on traditional disciplinary purviews, silos of funded projects, and poor communication among researchers across intellectual boundaries, is at odds with the conceptual underpinnings of CI. In this respect, the past should not be prologue: our traditional methods of doing business and conducting research, as well as our systems of professional advancement, may undermine our best intentions unless we recognize the limitations of the academic procedures that have brought us to a point of new awareness.

IJDL special on e-Science and Digital Libraries

The International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL), Vol. 7, No. 1-2, October 2007, pp. 1-122, ISSN 1432-5012 (Print) 1432-1300 (Online) is a special feature on e-Science and Digital Libraries.

Within the issue is a set of ten articles (six long and four short) representing a range of perspectives on eScience, and the use of digital libraries to organize science collections, that will be of interest to both the eScience and digital library communities. The articles highlight the synergies and differences between the communities, and the challenges present in managing
massive collections.

...

the digital library community is concerned with the scholarly life cycle, an essential component of eScience practices that are driven by the nature of scientific scholarship. As such, there will be benefits from increased partnership between the two communities. A closer partnership between the two communities can be developed around three areas:

• Support for the range of the scholarly communication lifecycle
• The role of data within both communities
• Broader participation of the digital library community in eScience

Connecting digital libraries to eScience: the future of scientific scholarship
doi:10.1007/s00799-007-0030-9

There are many topics that you will have read about in my blog before, including

• Pathways - doi:10.1007/s00799-007-0016-7 - blog posting September 26, 2005
• DILIGENT - doi:10.1007/s00799-007-0023-8 - blog posting September 24, 2006
• Provenance Explorer - doi:10.1007/s00799-007-0018-5 - blog posting September 23, 2006

CODATA 2008 - CFP - Scientific Information for Society

The call includes a session on e-Science

Session 2 . e-Science and e-Science Networks

    * International multi-disciplinary large data projects for science and education and for business applications; Global scientific data sharing and application;
    * Regional and global e-science and cyberinfrastructure developments;
    * Grid infrastructure and standards for resource sharing across networks and institutions;
    * Advanced cluster computing algorithms for data processing in computational fluid dynamics, structural crash analysis, MEMS design, financial modeling, factory scheduling, etc.;
    * Advanced distributed data processing methods for science and engineering applications;

21st International CODATA Conference: Scientific Information for Society - from Today to the Future
Ukraine, Kyiv, 5 - 8 October, 2008 - Call for Papers

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 1 February 2008

GRL2020 and the future of research libraries

There is an invitation-only event wrapping up today called Global Research Library 2020, co-convened by the University of Washington Libraries and Microsoft.  In a time when academic libraries are experiencing the very disruptive change of the searchable, digitial, Internet environment, these sorts of events can be useful to help everyone get their bearings. 

The Bielefeld Conference is another event, with invited speakers, that explores this space, it is bi-annual, the last one was the 8th International Bielefeld Conference in 2006.  I haven't heard anything about the next one although it should be coming up in a few months (hint to conference organisers: I am available...)

Deepak posted a video on YouTube that I saw in Facebook, reacting to Jon Udell's posting about the GRL event.  How's that for the linked participative web.

Udell says

The opportunities are abundantly clear to me, but what about risks? The only risk I can think of is maintaining status quo.

which is actually quite similar to my response to an interview question I just completed last night.

To me, research libraries need to identify the opportunities of the networked science environment, and be willing to cede roles in areas that are better handled by technology or by other organisations.  There are still many roles for science libraries to play in terms of educational outreach, particularly into the "citizen science" communities and "citizen health-information" areas.  There is a huge role in figuring out how to preserve a scientific record that can cross from YouTube to Facebook to two or three blogs in a since thread.  And a huge role to play in helping to manage scientific data.

However, time is not going to stand still waiting for libraries to step up to the plate.  What I heard from several people at SciFoo was basically (paraphrasing wildly) "we don't need to go to the library for books any more, so we don't even think about the library any more - we'd love them to be participants in the discussion, but they're either not there, or they're not willing to change perspectives from the old Temple of Books days".

My post with the single most traffic and response was "is the research library obsolete?"

I think ultimately the answer is "yes, unless it transforms itself into an e-science outreach organisation".

But that's my perspective as someone coming from outside the library, with a physics and computer science background - I'm not a librarian.

Deepak, that's the best I can come up with quickly... more thoughts on this throughout the week.

My categories for these kinds of postings is Academic Library Future.

E-Science and libraries

As I said over a year and a half ago

A lot of science today is very computation and data intense.  I think there is a big role for academic libraries as custodians of data and research output.

Science Library Pad - the role of the academic library and librarian - January 13, 2006

Fortunately, there are lots of people thinking about the role of the library in relation to cyberinfrastructure, as well as e-research and publishing.

This month's D-Lib has a number of relevant articles and opinion pieces, including

Library Support for "Networked Science"
by Bonita Wilson
doi:10.1045/september2007-editorial

Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 1: A Cyberinfrastructure Primer for Librarians
Anna Gold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1045/september2007-gold-pt1

Cyberinfrastructure, Data, and Libraries, Part 2: Libraries and the Data Challenge:  Roles and Actions for Libraries
Anna Gold, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1045/september2007-gold-pt2

The editorial by Bonita Wilson points to "The Dawn of Networked Science" in The Chronicle for Higher Education (which is not open to read, so no link for them).

I also recommend the August 2007 CTWatch Quarterly, which was on the topic "The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfrastructure".

A reminder that there will be an E-Science track in the upcoming OECD meeting on October 3, 2007.

For more information on this topic, you can see my E-Science category.

provide your input to OECD participative web conference

There will be an event "OECD-Canada Technology Foresight Forum on the Participative Web: Strategies and Policies for the Future" on October 3, 2007 in Ottawa, Canada, so in slightly under three weeks from now.  You still have time to submit your comments as well as to suggest blog links and feeds

---> Participate online <---

There will be 2 official event bloggers who will blog about the event during the meeting. One will be a representative from civil society (ICANN) and one will be from Canada.

Err, the latter would be me.  I think the blogging will be on an official OECD site rather than here.

UPDATE 2007-09-30: The blog has gone live. ENDUPDATE

The event will be webcast live as well as archived with transcripts.

There are already some videos submitted by participants, rather confusingly listed under "podcasts", which they are not.

There is an E-Science session in the programme (PDF)

Session 2 STREAM B
Research 2.0: e-Science and new ways of interaction in the science community
Chair: Walter Stewart, Walter Stewart & Associates Inc.
- Andrew Herbert, Managing Director, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
- Bill St. Arnaud, Senior Director Advanced Networks, CANARIE Inc.
- Daniel Atkins, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation
- Ulf Dahlsten, Director for "Emerging Technologies and Infrastructures", Information Society and Media Directorate-General, European Commission

Check out

http://www.oecd.org/futureinternet/participativeweb

for more information.

I also created an Upcoming event and Google calendar entry and am suggesting the tag oecdwebforum2007

Bill St. Arnaud also provided a pointer a while back to the OECD report on this topic

OECD, 12-April-2007, Working Party on the Information Economy - PARTICIPATIVE WEB: USER-CREATED CONTENT (PDF, 888KB)

UPDATE 2007-09-14: I have made a Google Earth KMZ for the conference venue and hotels where the organisers have arranged room availability.  You can also view it in Google Maps.  I have indicated the location of Canada's Parliament as well.  It may be the only Parliament in the world where you can sometimes see people playing frisbee on the front lawn.  Note: Don't confuse the Government Conference Centre venue (the old Ottawa Union Station) with the Ottawa Congress Centre, located a block away.  Also note in some cases Google is not showing proper street names for downtown Ottawa at the moment.

Download OECD-ParticipativeWebForum.kmz

View Larger Map

data-driven science - Lee Dirks - June 22 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

Lee Dirks - Director, Scholarly Communication - Microsoft
"Open access, data-driven science & the impact on research communication"

* basic research ACTIVITY unchanged
  but output options dramatically changed
  - blogs
  - wikis
  - scholarly journals
  - IRs
  - discipkine repositories
  - podcasts

Current Issues vs. Anticipated Trends

* OA to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm

* international cross-discipline research facilitated by interoperable standards

* "evolved" methods of peer review will be adopted

* preservation of data will become a requirement

* services develop around scientific content and prevail over pure publishing
  - data analytics, publishing workflow tools, long term storage/access

EDUCAUSE "Horizon Report" 2007 - for higher education IT in USA

* key trends
  - academic review and rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship
  - the notions of collective intelligence and mass amateurization are pushing the boundaries of scholarship
* critical challenges
  - assessment of new forms of work
  - isses of IP and copyright continue to affect how scholarly work is done

OA momentum

... S.2695

Blogging
- example: useful chem
- recording experiments that fail

Wikis for Sharing Lab Protocols
- example: OpenWetWare

Bookmarks
- example: Connotea

IR
- 1400+ repositories worldwide

Influence of IRs

http://www.webometrics.info/top3000.asp

The Promise of Data Sharing

PLoS article - Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate

"this is going to radically change science"

ISSUES
- data integration and interop
- annotation
- provenance & quality
- exporting/publishing in agreed formats
- security

"an aspect of competitive differentiation"

Publications as Live Documents

MS will have some results on this later this year

* helps with reproducibility if you can get to the raw data, simulations etc.

Trend: The Rise of Mass Collaboration

* Novartis released all its raw data on genetics of type 2 diabetes

[missed the end of the presentation]

Library SOA for catalogues, escience and more - Richard Akerman - June 12 - IATUL 2007

I have posted my presentation to SlideShare

http://www.slideshare.net/scilib/library-serviceoriented-architecture-to-enhance-access-to-science

and you can also download the PowerPoint from there (thanks to Amazon S3 storage via SlideShare).

All of the bookmarks in the presentation along with some supplementary links are available at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/iatul2007akerman

I was pleased with the response to my presentation.  There was interest from people in many different roles and organisations, and I am becoming increasingly convinced that at least for national library scale IT projects, SOA is gaining increasing traction.

I will use this posting as a starting point for discussions and any further ideas I may think to add.

UPDATE 2007-09-06: My paper is available in E-LIS.

e-Research infrastructures and scientific communication - Ralph Schroeder - June 12 - IATUL 2007

Ralph Schroeder
Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford, UK
http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/

e-Research infrastructures and scientific communication

Oxford e-Social Science Project

* Emergent Patterns in Scientific and Scholarly Communication

Background
* networks of tools and data shared by communities of researchers

Is e-Science a niche, or is it the new science (the new system of knowledge production).

Emerging Patterns
* Recognition of data as valid scientific outputs
* Fragmented communication system in relation nto e-Research
* Alternative models of dissemination by-pass traditional models

Components of Infrastructures and e-Research
* Policy
* Organizational and technical forces
* Everyday practices of researchers
* Openness
- various parts of the digital infrastructure ... should be able to interrelate in a flexible
and seamless way
- difficult to achieve in practice
- forms of openness still fluid

traditional distinction between tools and resources being blurred

Developing Countries
* levels of participation
- network
- scientific communication

DCs mostly not at cutting edge in uses of truly advanced networks

OA and IRs provide a level of participation for DCs in scientific communication

Challenge: consideration of how the developing world may be kept in line with e-Research
developments

Conclusions
* e-Research systems add a layer of complexity
* Making open systems extend to DCs involves a range of issues

OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007

Jens Vigen, Library Director
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Open Access and repositories : beyond green and gold

both subject repositories and institutional repositories

* subject repositories - used by researchers
* institutional repositories - store and track organisation's research output

constructing new repository system
applied for grant for 50 person years over the next 4 years

standing on digital shoulders

* more than 15 years after the invention of the Web, scientific information remains an electronic clone
of the paper era
* specialized libraries can play a pivotal role in preparing the route for their communities
towards eScience

Scientific information provision in the era of eScience

* full text and data mining
* detection of relations between articles
* treatment of large datasets for satistical and citation analyses
* identification of popular and influential articles and authors with complementary ranking criteria:
alternative metrics to ISI
* access to numerical info from figures and tables within articles
* offer integrated access to primary scientific data

[mentions some interesting work at LANL on mapping relationships between articles]

[belives the EU 7th framework will produce a lot of results in the above areas]

HEP (high energy physics)

* infrastructure for repository of scientific information
* entire corpus of HEP information in one place
* current priority
- empower the repository with new technology and conent: enabling researchs to explore information
matching the emerging expectations of the eScience era

survey to see if they are meeting user needs

results will be published as a paper

systems used

3% publisher portals
11% google

86% community services
- 28% subject repositories
- 58% specialised libraries

tagcloud (tagcrowd)

important features of an information system
* 93% depth of coverage
* 91% quality of content
* 94% access to full text
* 93% search accuracy

What changes do (surveyed responders) expect?

* seamless access to articles via portal
* improved full-text search
* conference presentations indexed and link to articles
* publication of data
* peer-review overlaid on subject repositories
* smarter search tools

dreams

* see research in context, follow a research thread
* ... more

VIsion
* build a complete HEP information system
* with full-text, data-mining etc.
* demonstrate and deploy Web 2.0 applications in the domain of sciences

Conclusions
...
* librarians have the opportunity to play a key role in the era of eScience
* express interest if you would like to join

Comment: engineering is not as advanced in information use

cyberinfrastructure for the humanities

In Data Mining, Collaboration, and Institutional Infrastructure for Transforming Research and Teaching in the Human Sciences and Beyond, Cathy Davidson discusses many aspects of how cyberinfrastructure can and is transforming teaching and research

That brings me to another point, which may appear tangential but which is at the heart of the matter. New ways of thinking need support. If, at present, academic rewards go to the author of a monograph, especially one that posits a different analytical or interpretive hypothesis, for Human Sciences 2.0 we need to think of ways to reward teams of scholars working cross-culturally on collaborative projects. Collaborative work should count, and here humanists can use models that scientists have developed for determining credit in co-authored projects with multiple investigators.

...

We also need to rethink paper as the gold standard of the humanities. If scholarship is better presented in an interactive 3-D data base, why does the scholar need to translate that work to a printed page in order for it to “count” towards tenure and promotion? It makes no sense at all if our academic infrastructures are so rigid that they require a “dumbing down” of our research in order for it to be visible enough for tenure and promotion committees.

CTWatch Quarterly, Volume 3, Number 2, May 2007.

As a side note, the Cyberinfrastructure Technology Watch (CTWatch) blog relaunched on May 25, 2007.

Previously:
March 25, 2005  Cyberinfrastructure Tech Watch Blog operational

report on European research infrastructures

As part of the EU Seventh Research Framework Programme (FP7) - Capacities - Research Infrastructures

I found the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) report European Roadmap on Research Infrastructures (2006) but it didn't really give me much of a sense of direction, too many areas with too many different types of projects.

I don't see much about e-infrastructure / e-science / e-research in the ESFRI report.

There is however a big e-infrastructure section in the FP7-INFRASTRUCTURES-2007-1 Call for Proposals Work Programme.

Previously:
February 07, 2007  Europe - Canada research connection

undersea cyberinfrastructure

Some interesting Canadian science sensor workflow achievements, albeit with a typically complex IBM solution

In September 2005, [VENUS] Data Management Archive System (DMAS) was awarded a grant from the CANARIE Intelligent Infrastructure Program (CIIP) for a project called: “Toward a Service Oriented Architecture and Workflow Management for VENUS and NEPTUNE”. The goals of this project were to provide these two high profile Canadian Cabled Ocean Observatories with an integrated scientific instruments management system, the capability to deliver event information to users, as well as integrated access to distributed compute and data resources through the use of innovative technologies.

The initial draft of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was proposed by IBM Canada, one of the largest R&D investors in Canada. This architecture was later refined by the DMAS team. It is worth mentioning that this is also the approach taken by Alcatel for the interaction with the NEPTUNE backbone.

This style of information systems architecture enables the NEPTUNE Canada and VENUS DMAS to be built by combining loosely coupled and interoperable services. The IBM Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) with its underlying message system WebSphere MQ provides the features such as point-to-point data delivery and message publish-and subscribe to implement the DMAS SOA.

Bill St. Arnaud - Cyber-infrastructure for undersea instruments and networks - in CAnet News - February 20, 2007

German scientific library services

Because how often do I get to use "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" in a sentence?

DFG - Scientific Library Services and Information Systems: Funding Priorities Through 2015 (PDF)

9 pages, English.

I think Lorcan will like this:

Today's libraries, archives and other specialised information services operate largely independently of one another.  These different institutions must integrate into a coherent nationwide network for the provision of digital information for science and the humanities.  By creating a digital environment within universities and research institutes in which digital channels become the standard medium for accessing, analysing and publishing research data and scientific results, libraries can become the cornerstone of e-science.

Another part that jumped out at me was about their scientific information portal

The creation of Vascoda, the nucleus of a "German Digital Library," sponsored mutually by libraries and specialised information services, represented an important building block in the development of an integrated system of national information provision.

via In Between

(In case you're wondering

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG] (German Research Foundation) is the central, self-governing research funding organisation that promotes research at universities and other publicly financed research institutions in Germany.

)